First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. 137 



ybunc? wa/io?75 circled by all that exalts and embellishes civilized 

 life. It was merely to discover a thoroughfare to the Pacific and 

 the Indies ready made to their hands. This ideal was never 

 realized, and under the old regime of the French it never could be. 



To make such a pathway, or rather more than royal highway 

 •was a beau ideal reserved for the Anglo-Saxon of our times, and 

 his ideal was straightway actualized, — the firstlings of his heart 

 became the firstlings of his hand. Some of us cannot worship 

 the heroes of our trans-continental roads. Even we, however, 

 must admit that but for their iron will we should even now re- 

 joice in no iron ways. 



Indians and French — path-finders like Fremont — were a 

 vapor that appeared for a little time — at most an Indian summer. 



Yankees brushing them away, working mines of lead and lum-' 

 ber, and ihsn extracting agricultural wealth yet more perennial 

 and wide-spread, have built on firmer foundations, and are efflo- 

 rescing in a higher style of culture throughout all departments of 

 life. 



The French who occupied the Northwest either as missionaries 

 among Indians, and those bound by vow to celibacy, or who 

 adopted Indian ways of life, naturally proved a race no less 

 ephemeral than the natives themselves. They vanished all the 

 sooner beciuse they entered that region in small numbers. Indeed 

 French immigrants were nowhere numerous in America. 



But had one single feature of French policy been different, the 

 change in American history would have been great beyond cal- 

 culation. Huguenots, the only class of Frenchmen ready to leave 

 France^ were not permitted to enter New France. Had they been 

 welcome there, legions of them would have penetrated its wilds 

 as far as any fanatical Jesuit or jolly rover. They would have 

 outnumbered the English Americans, being driven abroad by 

 worse persecutions at home. They would have furnished mate- 

 rial for such agricultural and manufacturing centers on the Upper 

 Lakes as Li Salle vainly strove to found in, Illinois. 



In the next place, most of those French refugees who enriched 

 Switzerland, Holland, Germany, England, and divers British col- 

 onies, especially those on the Atlantic coast, with new arts or old 



